The labour movement has been unable to de-link itself from its archenemy: capital. As its structures bureaucratise, as its leaders become career unionists, as it opens investment companies and pays staff increasingly inequitable salaries, it increasingly mirrors the very thing it is fighting. If the South African Federation of Trade Unions is to meet its promise, it must be fundamentally different from the organisation it was born out of.

A federation will not liberate the class, nor will its affiliates; only the working class can liberate itself and it will never be able to do that as long as there is an implicit belief in a Great Leader/s; as long as the union is seen as a legal service and as long as power and money are centralised. A truly participatory, democratic trade union would be one where the locals/branches of each affiliate control the membership dues collected, where they would use their dues to do work on the ground and put some aside for provincial and national work; where the workers have direct ownership of the means of trade union production (negotiation, representation, mobilisation) and where the extremely loosely used term, democracy, translates into individual worker agency and empowerment to ensure that the base, the majority, the working class, is where true power lies, and that it uses its power to change the world for the benefit of the many.

The Municipal Workers’ Union of Cachoeirinha (Sindicato dos Municipários de Cachoeirinha – SIMCA) is a union that fights for workers’ rights in class-based struggles in Brazil. Founded on June 20, 1989, it has consistently been a protagonist in struggles both initiated by the Union and by other social movements. The municipal workers of Cachoeirinha have been leaders in the organization and mobilization of these struggles, refusing to stay quiet in the face of arbitrary and authoritarian exploitation of labor, mismanagement on the part of bosses and government officials, and the injustices imposed “from above.”

Debate

"The claim that "syndicalist unions broke off from mainstream federations to form 'purely revolutionary' unions, cutting themselves off from the mass of workers" doesn't hold up, though it does conform to the Leninist orthodoxy of "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. There were many countries where the syndicalist unions were the majority--such as Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil. Syndicalist unions in South Africa, such as the Industrial Workers of Africa (modeled on the Industrial Workers of the World), were the only unions that organized native African workers, who were excluded from the white craft unions.
At the time of the mass occupation of the factories in Italy in September 1920, the USI (Italian Syndicalist Union) was claiming 800,000 members, and the factory councils formed throughout Italy in those events were mostly organized by the USI. Moreover, it was the anarcho-syndicalists who initiated a militia movement ("arditti del popolo") to fight Mussolini's fascist squads. But the Communists didn't cooperate, and the Socialist Party capitulated to fascism.